re: #66 Cato the Elder

A young cousin of mine is reading Hobbes in college and posted on Facebook last night about how she hates him and his “incorrect punctuation”.

Then a friend of hers said, “Yeah, I mean, I was thinking more along the lines of justifying horrible atrocities and believing that humans have no capacity for anything beyond self interest and are best controlled by a despot, but if you’re going to hate on hobbes [sic], punctuation works too.”

Which made me think.

So I wrote: “As for despots, it seems in some cases, at least, a majority of Americans agree with him. At any rate the popular judgment on the Iraq war objectively correlates to the statement ‘the Iraqi people would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power’.”

Discuss.

With cousins like you posing questions like that … who needs college?